Ruth Nicole Brown

Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown is the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her research and creative praxis explores how Black girls conceptualize freedom, creativity, and relationships in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT). Brown founded SOLHOT in 2006 as a collective space to celebrate Black girlhood and to date it remains her most cherished and consistent practice of meeting Black girls face to face and heart to heart. Brown’s Black Girl Genius Week (BGGW) exhausts the rituals of SOLHOT to widen the cipher and experience the imaginative capabilities and artistry that only occurs when Black girls and women are together as homegirls. BGGW has taken place in central Illinois, Columbia, SC, and Chicago, IL. As an episteme, SOLHOT functions as praxis, workshop, and studio; it is an agitational university that creates and expands spaces and places for organizing and doing of Black girlhood celebration, again and again. Brown’s sense of poetic timing and preference for what is beautiful, useful, and soul nourishing are cultivated into a collective poetics-politics-ethics, to be shared in community. She has authored two books, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood (University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward A Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy (Peter Lang, 2009). Brown is in a band called We Levitate and has devised and/or performed in several SOLHOT shows including “The Mixtape Remix” (2011), and “Check In!” (2010).

You can read more about her work here.